Category Archives: interlude

Digging down to the heart of the matter? Otherwise I haven’t a clue… XXXOOO

Small scared boy
in an old man’s body,
worn down too soon
under the weight of his principal sin:
coming into existence at the intersection
of two lives who should never have intertwined.
Altering the vectors of their shared destinies,
a descent into chaos and desperation
and madness and shame
and violence bloody and silently bloodless both.

How can he find release
and the possibility of renewed life
when that spear is embedded too deep,
threatening to eviscerate him if pulled out?

He don’t know
and we don’t know
and a hundred suns will implode
under this darkest matter.
His heart will simply shatter
shutter aflutter one day.

The lazy American now stops, strokes his chin ponderously, and decides he will share a tidbit of his profoundness with his echo chamber.

His sonorous pronouncements into the void make a lovely resonance which fills him with self-reverence.

No one responds. No one but him cares of these things of import upon which he importunes. Even he lets his mind drift to some other next thing which interests him, only dropping this–whatever–here so that he might point to it in a day, in a year, and muse upon its empty greatness.

And then he will lurch on to the next distraction.

Meanwhile, machines kill distant unknowns unbeknownst to him in his name, as we lay dying a heat-death in a fevered dream.

(A fragment of something bigger I was working through one Friday night)

Wanting and dreaming of wresting love back
from fate and physics and fury and history and pain,

Futuristorical histrionically
interintrinsicalligorically imperative…

This is what your love was to me.
This is the me that is no more without you.
Unmoored in mourning black & white-knuckling
sober divorcee’s blue, red and grey.
In twilight’s every minute of the day…
Since you went and you
Moved yourself away your embrace denied…
The mourning after the day you voice-mailed me your love died,
My one and only foolish-impulsive ex-bride.

Why do I choose to continue
Enacting my ruminatin’ magisterbations anon and on again?
Another word jazz jelly tonight
Over matrimonially mutual delusional decisions made,
Of impulsively romantic adventure aventured
By two overgrown children one summer.

I never actively pursued journalism in college. I was a theater major at first, then leaned toward English as a major. I seemed to back into publishing as a consequence of being my father’s son.

With the experience I had, a couple of things were obvious from the get-go. First, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE LIBERAL MEDIA. Anyone who’s spent more than a minute in a journalistic setting will be disabused of that notion immediately. Thus, anyone who subscribes to this myth is either being actively dishonest with themselves or with you, or is an idiot.

Or both. Fox News exists as a way of creating and maintaining a dull and credulous audience of mental deficients who are played Pavlov style with tropes that should have died with Reagan’s brain.

Also, and somewhat related: the phenomenon of “unbiased reporting” is not the default setting of journalism. It is what gets taught in school–the five Ws are as basic as the reverse pyramid of crafting a story. But it’s *what sells papers*, or *what gets eyeballs on your page* that is the true default setting.

In the American hegemony, “news” is a business–mainly because we know of no other way to operate. Consider how PBS finds constant difficulty getting and keeping funding for its often stellar reporting.

Raw data is culled and shaped first by the story’s author, no matter how objective that author thinks he or she is. Then, it’s passed by an editor who further refines (or dilutes, depending on whether it’s your words) the product into something that gets shoehorned between ads, the space for which is what pays the bills. And if something about that story will piss off (or merely annoy) one of those paying customers, the story is further “refined” or deleted all together.

This is old. 25-plus years old. I remember singing this reggae to myself as I drove home from school, down 101 to Carr’s Store, where you turn onto 137 to go to Hancock. This was the earliest portion of the original Roadside Truckstop to come into being. Here you go. I love you.

Living in the concrete jungle
Where life is a constant struggle
Living from day to day
It all ends the same anyway
If life is too big a load,
Go to the end of the road.
Go to the elephant graveyard
You know we all end up there someday.

You know we all got our own path,
And life moves too fast.
If a little good comes your way
You know it’s too good to last.
If the road is too rough a ride
Go to the truckstop by the roadside
Go to the elephant graveyard
You know we all end up there someday.

(spoken)
Well it’s just my opinion,
And this is my final refrain,
That it don’t take a genius
To figure out life is pain.
I tell you there’s a better way
Than to weep on the shards of a bad day.
But if you need some way
To follow the sunset someday
Go to the roadside truckstop
Or stop in there one day.

Okay. what am I getting at here? Besides the fact that this keyboard is not conducive to typing.

I, John Grow, born in 1968 and currently returning to type this sentence after admiring the ass of a passing woman in a pair of lovely boots, do not believe in the god of the Abrahamic religions. This to me is a “no-brainer.”

The god of the bible (whatever that entity is–even the books that make up the bible are inconsistent on that score) is a work of fiction. Whether it was earnestly generated from the worldview of the writers of the various books or whether it was cynically constructed by those same men for population control and tribal identity, it is a work of fiction.

You, whomever you are, if you are “a believer,” you hold in your head a certain construct that you call “god.” Or “Jesus.” Or “Allah.” Or even “Buddha,” if you really didn’t pay attention to what buddhism is about.

This mental construct is what you refer to when you speak of god or Jesus or the others. I don’t know if I need to spell this out further to you, but if you really were paying attention to what and how you learned, it should have been plain that your version of Jesus, let’s say, and someone else’s, are as different as the minds that hold them. Even if you both had the same classes in school, your conclusions are affected by your history and environment to that point, and the perceptions which have evolved from that.

tl;dr: Your Jesus is *your* Jesus, not someone else’s. You merely agree for the sake of argument you’re talking about the same thing.

There is a term called “consensual reality” that I first read in my Zen days. Basically, reality is what we agree it is among ourselves overtly or tacitly, hence “consensual.”

So when you all talk about your god or your Jesus or your allah, you need to consider whether you speak of your own concept or the one you tacitly agreed to by joining whatever fan club you belong to.

This is one of the things that go into what I mean when I call myself “atheist.” In my worldview, this also means I don’t believe in a heaven or a hell or a soul, though I have experienced both heaven and hell in my own life. I also use all three terms–”heaven,” “hell,” and “soul,” as shorthand for bigger, harder-to-wield concepts.

I used to do the same thing with “god.” The concept I proxy with that word is closer to Einstein’s or Spinoza’s concepts than to the Abrahamic one.

In the end, they are still mental constructs. Everything is, and nothing is (hello Meher Baba).

We exist in a matrix of constructs of our own creation. Somebody else made the Valentines Day cards in the rack in front of me, as well as the wire rack itself, the paper and the ink, the paint, the steel in the wire. But the concepts behind them are just things some group of somebodys came up with at various points in linear time.

The wan loneliness I feel at not having a sweetie to give one of those cards to is also a construct. One of ego and longing and the soupy mess those have made in my life since at least puberty.

Truth is as slippery and illusory as any other mental construct. I’d go so far as to state that truth-seeking is nothing more than a search for validation of the concepts one already holds.

This is especially true if you’re not honest about the most central and basic illusion of them all: Yourself.